Canva's 360-Degree Customer View with Fivetran

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Buildings
Cement

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Behavior & Emotion Tracking
Building Automation & Control

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

The Challenge

Canva, an online design and publishing tool, was under pressure to grow its customer base across three service levels—free, pro, and enterprise. The sales, marketing, and engagement teams needed to identify targets, understand their behavior, and deliver the right message at the right time on the right platform. This required a 360-degree view of the customer across Canva’s digital properties and third-party platforms such as Google, Facebook, and other social media and SaaS tools. The main challenge was the lack of comparison insight. There was no way to analyze Facebook data against Google data or any other platform. Building a point-to-point architecture to pull data into competing platforms would be messy and expensive to maintain. The custom-built solution functioned as intended, but the demand for connectors to more data sources was growing, and the time and resources required to build these connectors were not scalable.

About The Customer

Canva is an online design and publishing tool that aims to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere. As a scaleup company, it offers three distinct service levels—free, pro, and enterprise. The company's success depends on its ability to identify targets, understand their behavior, and deliver the right message at the right time on the right platform. This requires a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior across Canva’s digital properties and third-party platforms such as Google, Facebook, and other social media and SaaS tools.

The Solution

Greg Roodt, Head of Data Platforms at Canva, decided to build a hub-and-spoke data pipeline to pull everything into a central data warehouse. After researching the data integration market, he chose Fivetran for its ease of setting up connectors to popular marketing, sales, and engagement platforms. Canva now uses Fivetran to pull marketing and sales analytics from dozens of platforms in the cloud to the company’s data platform managed by Snowflake. Insights derived through the company’s business intelligence tools, Looker and Mode Analytics, allow marketers to make necessary tweaks in engagement and optimize results. The aggregate information from Fivetran’s Google Adwords, Bing, and iTunes connectors can be combined with first-party data from various Canva digital properties, providing a complete, 360-degree view of the customer. Adding connectors is easy, and custom connectors can be created within a few days if needed.

Operational Impact

Fivetran has enabled Canva to have a true 360-degree view of the customer and the business. Key stakeholders now know precisely who is engaging with Canva’s digital properties and how they get there through the marketing and sales pipeline. These powerful insights optimize marketing and advertising spend, allowing the company to be more efficient with customer acquisition and retention. Greg plans to continue expanding Canva’s data analytics capabilities through Fivetran by funneling data back to the company’s sales, marketing, and engagement platforms—enriching the insights even further. In the meantime, stakeholders across the organization will increase their understanding of customer behavior with additional connectors and reap the operational benefits.

Quantitative Benefit

Fivetran saves Canva over $200,000 per year in engineering costs
Canva now has a 360-degree view of customers across Canva and third-party platforms
Fivetran data gives Canva’s marketing team the ability to optimize marketing and advertising spend